“I have a weird one,” Priya said. “It’s a horror film.”

She was good at it. The firm jawline, the silver-streaked hair she refused to dye, the voice that could cool a room or warm a heart. But the parts were thinning out. Last month, she’d auditioned for the role of a retired assassin. She’d learned a knife-fighting choreography. She’d aced the menace. The director, a boy of twenty-six wearing sneakers worth her first car, had smiled and said, “That was amazing , Elena. But we’re going with someone younger. More… feral.”

The final scene was a monologue. Celeste, facing the last survivor, says: “You think aging is a loss of power. But you are a candle. I am a bonfire that has burned down to coals. You cannot snuff me out. You can only walk into my heat and be changed.”

Elena swirled her champagne. She looked across the room at Mira Chen, who was laughing with a group of elderly stuntwomen—all of them former dancers, all of them in their sixties and seventies, all of them glowing with the quiet satisfaction of having won a war no one knew they were fighting.

Silence.